Epilogue: When might we go back to the Moon?

From the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. Reproduced with
the permission of Journal editor Eric M. Jones

For much of the 20th Century, humanity has been getting used to the
idea of people traveling through space and, eventually, living and
working on worlds other than Earth. During the first half of the
century, pioneers like Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert Goddard, Werner
von Braun and others thought and wrote about space travel and slowly
worked out some of the basic technologies that would make it possible.
Science fiction writers extrapolated even farther into the future and,
long before anyone actually worked out the details of building a
spaceship, the fiction writers put cities of the imagination on the
Moon and Mars and filled the spaceways with passenger ships and cargo
vessels busily engaged in interplanetary commerce. For some people,
acceptance of these outlandish notions was out of the question; but, by
the time Yuri Gagarin made the first spaceflight in 1961, a sizable
fraction of the literate world had been exposed, at least, to the dream
of space as a frontier. Although interplanetary commerce will have to
wait for the 21st century, by the late 1950's the dream had become
familiar enough that, when John Kennedy proposed a lunar landing as a
technological feat to impress mankind, almost everyone involved - those
who would do the work, those who would pay for it, and those whom
Kennedy sought to impress - understood the symbolism. Here was a big,
bold step into the future.

Unfortunately, Apollo was so bold a step that the pace could not be
sustained. Into the late 1960's, the space community had high hopes
that Apollo would lead directly to the construction of a permanent base
on the Moon and, sooner rather than later, to the first voyages to
Mars. Von Braun and his collaborators had sketched such projects in a
series of articles published in Collier's Magazine in the early 50's;
and, once the big rockets were actually being built and the first lunar
landings were at hand, there were moments when it almost seemed as
though the Moon Base and Mars were in reach. But it was not to be;
and, indeed, hindsight suggests that, because of economic and political
factors, there was no real chance of sustaining Apollo beyond a handful
of landings.

The main reason why Apollo ended as quickly as it did was simply that
it was very expensive. The Space Age began during a period of intense
rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union and, during the
four years that led up to the Apollo decision, America was subject to
one humiliation after the another. Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev
had bid the political value of dramatic space "firsts" so
high that, in response to the Gagarin flight, President Kennedy had to
find a way of achieving a clear, unambiguous, final victory in what had
become the "Space Race". What was required was an
undertaking "so expensive and so difficult to accomplish"
that the Russians would have little chance of keeping pace. So Kennedy
committed the United States to a giant step forward. However, Apollo
was so expensive and so difficult that it could not continue for very
long. America's political will to win the Space Race could not be
translated into political and financial support for sustained lunar
operations, not to mention voyages to Mars. At it's peak in 1965, the
annual cost of Apollo was about 0.8 percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic
Product and, as more recent history suggests, there is political
support for a program only a quarter that size.

The evidence of the years since Apollo ended is that the United States
and many other nations are committed to space, partly as an investment
in the development of new technologies, partly in the interest of
attracting talented young people to engineering and the sciences,
partly in the interest of participating in the long-term economic gains
that space is expected to produce, and also, in large measure, because
there are few other things now within human reach that are quite so
fascinating. In the United States, political support for space
development currently translates into a funding of about 0.25 percent
of the Gross Domestic Product. In the early 1990's, the NASA budget
was about 15 billion dollars: enough to support the operation of a
four-vehicle Shuttle Fleet, the development of a Space Station, and the
conduct of a variety of scientific and engineering programs, but not
enough to include a lunar program as well.

Clearly, it was only the extraordinary political circumstances of the
1960's that made Apollo possible. For a brief time, whatever money
NASA needed to achieve the promised first landing was made available.
However, once the major pieces of the Apollo engineering work were
finished, funding began to shrink. The United States was willing to
spend what was needed to beat the Russians; but, once the Space Race
was decisively won, the country's political leaders decided that the
cost of a continuing lunar program was more than the country could
afford. The space budget even shrank to the point that NASA had to
cancel three Apollo missions for which flight vehicles had already been
built.

Over time, of course, economic expansion makes projects like a Moon
Base more affordable and, sooner or later, we will be able to undertake
a lunar program without having to spend an Apollo-like fraction of the
nation's wealth. During the past century and more, the American GDP
has doubled in real terms about once every twenty-five years and there
is every reason to believe that growth will continue for a long time to
come. Economic expansion comes largely as a result of gains in
productivity and, certainly, the limits to our creative use of new
machines, new processes, and new resources are nowhere in sight. As
the wealth of the nation grows and, indeed, as other nations acquire
spaceflight capabilities, the total level of space activities will
expand - albeit with ups and downs superimposed on the overall trend -
to the point that construction of a permanent lunar base will become
feasible. If, for example, we assume continued investment at about
0.25% of the growing GDP and we also assume that we could conduct a
space program that included both a space station and a lunar base for
about 30 billion 1990 dollars, then we might see a resumption of lunar
operations - preceded by a decade or more of preparatory work - in
about 2015.

Of course, if the NASA budget allotment were to grow more quickly than
the economy as a whole, we could build the lunar base sooner than
2015.

During the 70's, it was sometimes difficult to believe that the space
program hadn't suffered a fatal setback, that some ill-defined
"window of opportunity" hadn't closed. By the mid-70's,
NASA's budget had stopped shrinking and, measured in constant dollar
terms, even grew at a modest pace; but, after the glory years of
Apollo, the increments seemed far too small to bring the Space Station,
the Moon Base, and the Mars missions much closer to reality. Small
increments were too easily overwhelmed by the rising costs of doing
business. However, for a number of years following the 1986 Challenger
accident, there was a noticeable change in the national commitment.
The accident - and the public reaction to it - convinced Washington
that the country wanted to spend more in order to have a respectable
and productive space program; and, for a number of years after the
accident, NASA received hefty, annual budget increases. More recently,
the demands of social programs have come into direct conflict with the
space program and, as I write these words in April 1994, there is a
fierce debate raging in Washington over what has become the
international space station.

The space program and its supporters have been on a financial and
emotional roller coaster virtually from the beginning. The debate over
funding is sure to continue until the time comes that most of our
activities in space are self-supporting and public funding is no longer
required. The issue at the center of the debate is, of course, the
relative value of the space program and, as we have discussed, the
perception of space as a technology driver - coupled with the fact that
plenty of people still want to rub elbows with astronauts and plenty of
kids still want to grow up to be one - generates funding at a level of
about one quarter of one percent of the GDP. If the rules of the game
were to change, of course, then increased levels of funding might well
be in the cards. If, for example, people began to think that there was
a real possibility of a substantial, near-term economic return, then
new funding might well become available. The space community talks
hopefully about asteroid mining, about solar power satellites, and
about Helium-3 mining on the Moon but, unfortunately, they been unable
to convince anyone but the faithful that the technological risks are
low enough - and the potential payoffs large enough and soon enough -
to warrant spending large sums of public or private money.
Alternatively, the development of significantly cheaper transportation
systems would make it possible to do more at the current levels of
funding and, at the same time, would make a broader array of space
activities attractive. However, technical innovation is only part of
the answer to cheaper transportation. Of even great importance is the
ability to build many copies of a new vehicle and to fly them
frequently and efficiently. That is, economies of scale are crucial
and, to achieve them, we will probably have to rely on increases in
space activities to produce increases in demand and, therefore,
decreases in unit costs.

And, finally, we might hasten our return to the Moon if we become a
bit less cynical, a bit more mindful of the old maxims about preparing
for tomorrow, and, in the process, manage to rediscover our old
fascination with the frontier.

We shall see.

Whatever happens over the next few decades, the obstacles in our path
are almost all financial and political. Given money and a mandate, it
shouldn't - but might - take more than a decade to pick up where we
left off with Apollo. The simple fact that six Apollo crews landed on
the Moon and brought back a treasure throve of samples, data, and
experiences means that the lunar base designers will have to deal with
far fewer uncertainties than did the Apollo team. However, thirty-plus
years - from the end of Apollo in 1972 to a restart in, say, 2002 - is
a long time and, even if we wanted to reuse Apollo-era technology,
little of it is left on the shelf.

We will need to redesign much of the flight hardware and surface
equipment - partly to take advantage of the engineering advances of the
70's, 80's, and 90's, and partly to prepare for a very different mode
of lunar operations. Apollo was designed to meet a challenging
deadline for landing a first crew on the Moon. Cargo capacities were
extremely limited and none of the crews stayed for more than three
days. For the lunar base era, vehicles will have to be designed so
that there can be regular deliveries of supplies and equipment and in
quantities sufficient that crews can stay on the Moon for months at a
time and learn how to put local resources to use.

Lunar base operations will be far more complex than those that were
undertaken during Apollo but, if history is any guide, by building on
the Apollo experience and by taking advantage of the considerable
engineering advances of the intervening years, getting ready shouldn't
be as difficult or expensive as Apollo.

As an example, we might note that, between 1937 and 1945, von Braun
and his coworkers spent approximately 2 billion US Wartime dollars
designing and testing the V-2 rocket for the German Army. Although the
V-2 wasn't much more effective than the Russian-designed Scud missiles
fired by Iraq during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the cost of developing
the V-2 was surprisingly close - in inflation adjusted dollars - to the
cost of developing the Apollo Saturn V. In addition to the intrinsic
expense of developing any new technology, one very important cause of
the high cost of V-2 development was the simple fact that, at the time,
there was no practical way to make more than a few basic measurements
on any one test flight. When something went wrong - as it inevitably
did in the years before engineers could use computers and sophisticated
ground-test facilities to check out subsystems ahead of time - a series
of test flights had to be conducted to pin down the source of a problem
and to verify a fix. In all, the von Braun team conducted several
hundred test launches, most of them spectacular failures. Twenty-five
years later, when von Braun's team was designing the Saturn V,
engineering design procedures and the art of telemetry had advanced to
the point that only fifteen test flights (ten Saturn I's, three Saturn
IB's, and only two Saturn V's) had to be conducted before the vehicle
could be certified as safe enough to carry a human crew.
Significantly, despite the enormous increase in complexity over the
V-2, all of the test flights were successful; and, as well, the
constant-dollar development cost was only about fifty percent greater
than what Germany had spent on the V-2. Time brings new technologies
and fresh insights and makes difficult engineering tasks far more
tractable. going back to the Moon should be easier than going the
first time - assuming that we haven't choked the space program in red
tape before we can get started.

As I said at the beginning of this epilog, for much of the 20th
Century humanity has been getting used to the idea of people traveling
and working and, eventually, settling in space. For fully a fifth of
that century, we have been slowly sifting through the things that we
learned as a results of Apollo and, in the long run, it may be that we
needed time to think about it all. Because of the extraordinary
circumstances of the Cold War, Apollo was undertaken on a crash
schedule and, as Arthur C. Clarke noted in an essay published the week
of Apollo 11, too much happened too fast for anyone to properly
appreciate what had been done and where all of it might lead. Had the
space program developed more along the lines that von Braun outlined in
the early 50's, by the time we were ready to go to the Moon, the
program might have reached a stage of relative maturity comparable to,
say, the state of aviation in the post-Lindbergh/Earhart years. As
with the early stages of the Air Age, the Space Age was bound to have
had a period of public fascination with "firsts". But once
that phase had passed and the space program had settled down to a
more-or-less orderly program of development, it might have been
possible, then, to think of a lunar program as a natural next step - a
lunar program complete with plans for a permanent research station of
the Antarctic type and, most importantly, complete with modest
expectations and a commitment to the long haul.

Instead, the first lunar landing came only eight years after Gagarin
and, because it had all been so expensive, few saw a point in
continuing. Most people were thinking in the short term - about firsts
and about races and about oldest rocks - and not about the long-term
value of the Moon. Lunar operations were too expensive to continue, so
why think about the long term?

Eventually, we will go back to the Moon to build a permanent base and
to begin the crucial task of how learning how to "live off the
land" and, later on, develop products and industries that will
make lunar operations self-supporting. And, if Apollo was, perhaps, a
step taken out of sequence, the important point is that we did have six
successful landings and accumulated a wealth of samples, data, and
experiences.

Because of Apollo, we know what most of the Moon is made of and have
developed some ideas about how lunar materials could be put to use -
first as a way of making lunar base operations more efficient and less
expensive and, then, as raw materials for the construction and
operation of space-based industries. And we know, as well, some of the
tricks and some of the pitfalls involved in getting work done on the
Moon.

We have a great deal to learn and great deal to do. But we have been
to the Moon and can put that experience to good use as we prepare,
sooner or later, to go back.